


Stargate 101

by Melyanna (darthmelyanna)



Series: west-gate: A West Wing/Stargate Crossover [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1, The West Wing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 12:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17601188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthmelyanna/pseuds/Melyanna
Summary: When Will Bailey, a lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve and White House staffer, reports for duty at Cheyenne Mountain, he gets a lot more than he bargained for.





	Stargate 101

Jed Bartlet hung up the phone, feeling mentally spent after so much time trying to convince Russia to let him do what he’d already done. The evening had started with so much promise – a poker game with his senior staff – but had swiftly developed into a diplomatic incident and someone randomly shooting at the White House. If Abbey had been there, she would have killed him for letting himself go through so much stress all at once.

Thankfully, he and the Russian president had managed to work things out, and though there had been people in the press room when the bullets were fired at it, no one had been hurt. But as the poker game was breaking up, Leo pulled him aside.

“Sir,” he said, “Will’s going on reserve duty this weekend–”

“So I heard,” Jed interrupted. “Something about missiles not being fired when they were ordered to?”

“That’s the cover story, sir,” Leo replied. “He’s going to Cheyenne Mountain. We need someone to straighten out the red tape on Daniel Jackson’s legal status.”

“Because we don’t have a form for people coming back from the dead.”

“No, sir. But the Pentagon’s working on that.”

“Oh, good. Triplicate is exactly what we need to spice up a good, old-fashioned resurrection.”

Leo looked at him curiously. “You look like you’re getting an idea, sir.”

“Fitz and I were talking earlier,” Jed replied. “We got to talking about disclosing the Stargate sometime.”

“You thinking about doing it sometime soon?”

“Just talking.” Jed didn’t mention what else they’d talked about. Admiral Fitzwallace was beginning to feel that the SGC needed more civilian oversight – nothing like the NID, the legacy of the last administration, but true civilian oversight, someone other than an Air Force general leading the base. Jed had immediately thought of something, but in some ways he figured the idea would go over with Leo like a lead balloon.

“Well, sir,” Leo said, adjusting his jacket, “I’m going to send the staff home.”

“Send Will in here first, all right?” Jed replied. “I want to ask him something.”

“Yes, sir.”

Leo left, and a few minutes later Will came in from the chief of staff’s office. “You wanted to see me, Mr. President?” he prompted.

“I understand you’re off for Cheyenne Mountain tonight,” Jed said.

“Yes, sir,” said Will. “I’ve got about half an hour to get to the next flight.”

“Well, I won’t hold you up,” Jed replied. “Stop by on Monday, will you? There’s something I’ll want to talk about.”

“Not a problem.”

“Have a good flight.”

Will nodded and left, and Jed smiled just a little. At the end of a long and difficult day, he was far more amused than he should have been about high-strung Will finding out that there were aliens.

* * *

  
Will’s flight landed at Peterson Air Force Base around midnight local time, meaning it was two in the morning in D. C. and he hadn’t had much to eat in about fourteen hours. It was another half hour from Peterson to Cheyenne Mountain, and it wasn’t until they’d reached the parking lot that he wondered where the rest of the reservists for this were.

Upon his arrival, however, he was given a stack of papers and put in a small room by himself to read through them and sign. It turned out to be the longest non-disclosure agreement he’d ever seen in his life, and he already had top-secret clearance as a senior staff member at the White House. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this kind of form before.

A few minutes after he’d finished skimming and had signed, there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” he said, fiddling with his pen.

The door opened, and in came a man a little taller than himself and of a more muscular build. There was no rank insignia on his green BDU jacket, but on either arm were patches Will had never seen before. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m Major Marcus Lorne,” the man replied, leaving the door open. “I’m here to give you the dime tour.”

Will got to his feet immediately. “Lieutenant Will Bailey. Sorry, sir,” he said. “You don’t have. . .” He trailed off, gesturing to his collar.

“Yeah, SG teams don’t wear insignia,” the major said. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended.”

“SG teams?”

“Uh, yeah, this is the first time I’ve done this, and I have no idea where to start.”

Will shifted uncomfortably, wondering if this was the beginning of some weird hazing.

“So,” Lorne said. “You were told you were coming here to represent a couple guys who disobeyed orders to fire missiles at something that turned out be a meteor.”

“I was also told there’d be other people on this case,” Will said, and he glanced around the room. “I’m assuming since there aren’t, the whole thing about the meteor and the missiles is. . .”

“Yeah,” said Lorne. “You’re actually at a place called Stargate Command. That’s what the SG stands for. Stargate.”

“And a Stargate being. . .” Will was suddenly having flashbacks to _The Last Starfighter_.

“This big. . . gate,” Lorne replied, looking a little embarrassed at his lack of readily available synonyms, “that can transport matter instantaneously between gates. Major Carter could probably explain the science of it to you if you want, but she’s off-world at the moment–”

“She’s where?” Willl asked.

“Off-world,” Lorne repeated. “See, gates are on different planets. If you know the address of another gate, you can–”

“Go to another planet?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Suddenly Will needed to sit down, but the chair wasn’t where he remembered it being and he went crashing to the floor instead. Lorne came around the table, but he also heard another pair of boots hurrying inside. “I heard someone fall,” a woman said. “Is everything all right in here?”

“Lieutenant,” Lorne said, “you okay?”

“Yeah, just didn’t think the chair had moved,” Will replied.

He looked up to see a rather pretty woman hovering over him. “This is Dr. Janet Fraiser, CMO,” Lorne explained. “Doc, this is Lieutenant Will Bailey, from the JAG corps. He’s here to sort out the whole mess with Dr. Jackson being dead.”

“I’m here to do what?” Will demanded.

The doctor squatted down next to him. “Lieutenant, did you hit your head?” she asked, taking his head in her hands and examining the back .

“We hadn’t gotten that far, actually,” Lorne put in. “We’d just gotten to the part where we can go to other planets. I hadn’t even gotten started on aliens yet.”

“ _Aliens_?”

“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” Fraiser asked. “You’re awfully pale.”

“I work at the White House, Doctor,” Will replied. “It’s not like I have time to tan.”

“When was the last time you ate?” she continued.

“Lunch?”

The doctor looked at the other man and said, “Help him up.” Between the two of them, they got Will on his feet. “You need to eat something,” she continued. “The mess is closed, but I can take you someplace.”

“We weren’t finished,” Lorne protested.

“I can take over from here,” Fraiser said. “It’s not like he’s going to start working on any of this tonight.”

“All right.”

Dr. Fraiser led Will out of the room, and he followed her through the concrete corridors of the base. “Aliens?” he asked.

She laughed softly. “I’ll explain.”

Twenty minutes later, they’d left the base and arrived at her house, much to Will’s surprise. “The only places that are going to be open at this time of night are fast food places,” she explained, “and it’s not like I can tell you what you need to know in public.”

A little while later, they were sitting at the kitchen table, him with a sandwich and her with a salad. His stomach was growling by the time they’d both started eating. “So,” he said between bites, “aliens?”

Janet smiled, poking her fork around her salad. “There was an archaeological dig in Giza in 1928,” she said. “That’s when the Stargate was discovered. There’s a race of aliens called the Goa’uld who started using the gates and their superior technology to enslave humans and populate the galaxy, we think. Eventually the people of Earth rebelled, kicked their oppressors out, and buried the gate.”

“And it was found in Egypt? Seventy-five years ago?”

“Mmhmm,” Janet replied, nodding. “It wasn’t until about eight years ago that anyone figured out how to work it, though.”

“And you found aliens.”

“You’re really fixated on this alien thing, aren’t you?” she teased, smiling at him.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Will asked. “I mean, weren’t you?”

“Are you kidding? They threw me in the deep end. I was told what my job was and then had to deal with the entirety of the base personnel turning into Neanderthals. I barely had time to sit still, let alone freak out about everything.”

Will frowned. She was talking awfully quickly, and it occurred to him that she seemed way too energetic for one in the morning. “You probably don’t get time to sit still very often,” he remarked.

“Not really,” she replied. “Today was a nightmare. We had. . . Well, suffice it to say you probably won’t be seeing Dr. Jackson this weekend, and if you do, it’ll be for a very brief time. He spent the last several hours with the minds of about twelve people in his brain. Kind of exhausting.”

“Looks like it was pretty exhausting for you too.” He resisted the urge to ask how someone could get the minds of other people in his brain, but just barely.

“You could say that.” Janet laughed. “Next time he becomes a lifeboat for a dying civilization, he only gets to take on the personalities of nice, cooperative people.”

They ate in silence for a while, Will ruminating over this new information, knowing he didn’t have nearly all the details and knowing he was unlikely to get them. Then something suddenly occurred to him. “Wait a second,” he said. “Major Lorne said Dr. Jackson was dead!”

“He was,” Janet said, her voice calm, though she was smiling with her eyes as she took a long drink from her glass. “Or technically, he ascended to a higher form of being, but for all intents and purposes, he was no longer alive. And now he is.”

“And what are you people expecting me to do?”

“It turns out that coming back from the dead is easy,” Janet replied. “Getting yourself declared legally un-dead is the tricky part.”

Will realized then that he had to have been completely exhausted. That was the only way he could have gotten through this conversation without freaking out. He wasn’t sure if he was going to wake up in the morning and believe this wasn’t a dream.

Speaking of waking up in the morning. . .

Janet stood and took their mostly empty plates away. “I have to be at the base pretty early in the morning,” she said. “It was supposed to be my day off, but things happen. If you want, you could stay here tonight. The guest room’s in no condition for guests right now, but I’ve got a comfortable couch.”

“Right now I think a concrete floor would be comfortable, so long as it’s half-way level,” Will replied. “You sure it’s okay?”

“We’ll probably be up and out of here before my daughter’s awake,” she said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“If you say so.” Will got up and stretched. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

Janet murmured a response, but he didn’t hear it. He’d already wandered into the living room, where he was asleep on the couch within minutes.

* * *

  
He spent most of his weekend back at the SGC, meeting with General Hammond and figuring out how to get around a whole lot of red tape on the matter of Daniel Jackson’s legal status. Hammond actually confided to him at one point that he’d considered not actually reporting the archaeologist’s death, as he’d had a habit of not actually being dead when everyone had assumed he was. Will didn’t say it, but he wished the general had gone with his gut on that one. Granted, he wouldn’t have found out about the Stargate that way, but he wasn’t sure that would have been a bad thing, necessarily.

What struck him, though, was how sane everything seemed. Sitting in the mess, he could almost imagine himself in the cafeteria in the basement of the White House, though this place was a good deal plainer and the food much worse. Colleagues were sitting around working, discussing, arguing, and just enjoying each other’s company. If it hadn’t been for the whole thing with aliens (and he was pretty sure the huge black guy with the gold tattoo across the room was an alien of some variety) and some blonde scientist talking about harnessing something to do with exotic particle radiation, he would have thought this place was perfectly normal.

He was finishing up his third cup of coffee for the day – a lot for a Saturday – and jotting something down on a form when Doctor Fraiser walked up to him. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” she said. “Mind if I sit?”

“Sure, go right ahead,” he replied, gesturing to the chair across from him. “How’s your day been so far?”

“Blissfully quiet,” she said, sipping at her coffee. “I expect something to blow up any minute now.”

“This is a strange life you lead,” Will remarked.

“I could say the same for you,” Janet said, a slight smile on her face. “What is it you do at the White House, anyway?”

“I’m a janitor.”

He said it with a straight face, but she just raised a brow. “You’re a lawyer.”

“Hey, there’s sensitive trash in the West Wing.” When she started laughing, he lost his composure. “Yeah, can’t keep that up. I’m the deputy communications director.”

“Which means. . .”

“I write speeches. And herd interns.”

“Sounds like fun.” Her smiled faded. “I finally saw the news this morning. There was a shooting at the White House last night?”

In the wake of all the crazy things he’d heard about in the last fourteen hours, he’d almost forgotten about the events before he’d left Washington. “Yeah,” he said slowly.

“Were you in the building when it happened?”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “It was poker night. The whole senior staff was there. CJ Cregg and Toby Ziegler and I were actually in the press room when it was hit.” He had a vague recollection of hearing the shots fired and lunging at CJ to get her out of harm’s way.

“So how’d you end up with this assignment, anyway?” Janet then asked, probably seeing that he wasn’t all that comfortable. “Surely you could have done your weekend closer to DC in case the president needed you.”

Will shrugged. “The only thing I can figure is that I already had top-secret clearance. The background checks for my job were just done a few months ago, too.”

“You sure you weren’t sent here to spy on us for President Bartlet?”

Her tone was light, but the look in her eyes was rather serious. “I wouldn’t know where to begin as a spy,” he said. “For one thing, I’m kind of clumsy.”

“Yes, I noticed that last night.” Her lips twitched into a smirk, then she sobered. “In all seriousness, Lieutenant, you might consider not mentioning to anyone else that you’re in the president’s senior staff.”

“Why’s that?”

“People here tend to be wary of politicians,” Janet replied. “Too many bad experiences with civilian interference in the past. It’s nothing personal.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Janet was called back to the infirmary before long, and Will went back to work himself. It took him until the middle of the following day to finish up all the paperwork that would rescind Jackson’s death certificate with some kind of plausible explanation. The truth, obviously, was not an option.

On Sunday afternoon, before he headed to Peterson for his flight back to Washington, he stopped by the infirmary, hoping to thank Janet for her help. However, when he got there he found her with patients – patients whose skin was the most offensive shade of purple imaginable.

“This is a bad time,” he said from the door.

Janet looked up at him. “Nothing serious,” she said. “Major Lorne and Sergeant Zimmerman seem to have had a reaction to a food they were served off-world. They’ll be back soon enough to rosy cheeks instead of–”

“Violet?”

“Something like that.” She pushed Lorne’s head back and held his eye open. “Though I must say, Marcus, this is a fetching color for you.”

He glared. “You know, I still have some of those berries, Doc,” he said. “We could see what you look like in purple.”

“And after that we can compare,” she replied, with a teasing smile and a pat on his knee. Pulling off her latex gloves, she came over to the door where Will was waiting. “Did you need something?”

“Just wanted to thank you,” Will replied. “This was a pretty weird weekend, but I’m glad you were able to help me some.”

“Any time, Will,” she said, smiling broadly. “And if you’re ever in town again–”

“I’ll give you a call,” he finished.

On the flight across the country, he tried his best to get his thoughts together on the matter, knowing now why President Bartlet had asked to see him once he got back. It was too bad he didn’t really have anything coherent to say.

He went to the Oval Office when summoned, however, and once all the doors were closed, he said, his voice higher than normal, “ _Aliens_?”

The president and Leo just chuckled.

* * *

_The White House  
Three and a half years later_

Amid all the insanity of the disclosure of the Stargate, there was one major surprise for Will Bailey: Janet Fraiser had died just a few months after he had met her.

A lot had changed for him. He was now the chief of staff for Vice President Russell, and he had tried and failed to get his boss the party’s nomination for president. The Bartlet administration was swiftly coming to a close. And, perhaps oddest of all, he had a girlfriend now.

When he’d been told that President Bartlet was disclosing the SGC, he’d happily wondered if, when Janet was inevitably brought to Washington for hearings, he’d be able to take her out for a drink. That afternoon, he’d been given a memo on a Medal of Honor ceremony, and was shocked to see her award listed as posthumous.

He didn’t find out the circumstances of her death until the ceremony, which he watched on the television in his office. She had died bravely, attempting to save the life of a man whose team had been caught in an ambush. Thanks to her, he was still alive.

Thanks to her, many were still alive.

The honor was well-deserved, Will was sure, but there was something a little bittersweet about it. Medal of Honor recipients were remembered for their valor, for their achievements that went beyond the call of duty. They were remembered as legends. Will wanted to remember her as a lively and kind woman who’d offered him the use of her couch when he was too exhausted to get back to the SGC. He wanted to remember her teasing him and others. He wanted to remember Janet Fraiser, not a statue of her.

After the ceremony, CNN turned its attention to profiling Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter, the two living recipients of the award, and Will turned back to his desk. A few minutes later, however, there was a knock, and he looked up to see Kate Harper leaning against the doorframe, in full dress uniform.

“Were you watching the ceremony?” she asked, stepping inside.

“Yeah,” he replied, turning the television off. “You at it?”

“Yeah.” She picked up a paperweight from his desk and held it as though testing its weight.

He looked her up and down appreciatively. “Never seen you in that outfit before.”

“The Navy likes to remind me every now and then that I’m Commander Harper,” she replied. “Even though they gave me a job that requires me not to wear a uniform.”

“I like the look.”

She looked down and smiled a little. “You told me last week you were at the SGC once,” she said, changing the subject. “Did you meet Major Fraiser?”

“I think she preferred Doctor,” Will replied. “Yeah. She took pity on me while a major named Lorne was trying to explain the entire Stargate program in five minutes or less.”

“She did some remarkable things with her life,” Kate remarked.

“Yeah.”

After a brief silence, Kate set the paperweight down. “Why don’t you come down to the reception?” she suggested. “Her daughter’s there. Might be nice for you to introduce yourself.”

Will got up and straightened his jacket. “I’ve met her daughter, actually,” he said, coming around the desk.

“Really?”

They headed toward the door, and Will pushed his glasses up. “Yeah, I got to Cheyenne Mountain really late that night,” he explained. “Dr. Fraiser took pity on me. Fed me and let me crash on her couch. Her daughter came downstairs the next morning, saw me on the couch, and started screaming.”

Kate chuckled. “I bet that was fun.”

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “I think I was more scared than she was. Imagine being woken up by a teenaged girl screaming as only a teenaged girl can.”

“I bet Dr. Fraiser was amused by that.”

Will smiled. “Cassandra was beating me with a pillow when Janet came in. I think it took her ten minutes to stop laughing.”

“You should remind her of that,” Kate suggested softly. “Everyone down there’s talking about her like she was–”

“Superhuman?”

“Yeah. You knew her outside of that. Miss Fraiser might appreciate that.”

They continued down the corridor, Kate’s clicking heels echoing a little. “So,” Will said, “when you found out about the Stargate, were you freaked out about the whole thing where aliens are real?”

“No, not really,” Kate replied. “I was too busy trying to deal with some superweapon that was used to kill off all the Replicators to think about any of that.”

“Why am I the only one who freaked out about that?”

“You had time to freak out, Will,” she said. “You were just making a man un-dead. The fate of the galaxy wasn’t exactly resting in your hands.”

“Thank God for that.”


End file.
